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The Green Grid Collaborates with Data Center Leaders to Complete Energy Efficiency Measurement Recommendations

May 18, 2011 by Jeff Shepard

The Green Grid Association, a voice for advancing resource efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems, together with The Data Center Metrics Coordination Taskforce, delivered its latest recommendations for energy efficiency measurement and reporting.

"We are looking forward to working with our colleagues on the next steps for the industry, including identifying a roadmap for future efficiency programs such as IT productivity and carbon accounting."

The new report, titled "Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency: Version 2 – Measuring PUE at Data Centers" completes the guidelines for applying the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE™) metric, created and promoted by The Green Grid. The new information includes specific recommendations for how to measure and calculate PUE in mixed-use data center facilities and introduces a condenser water source energy weighting factor.

PUE determines the amount of energy used by a data center facility and the IT gear inside of it. A detailed explanation of PUE can be found on The Green Grid’s Web site.

Alignment on these methodologies across the industry will lead to consistent and repeatable measurement strategies that allow data center operators to monitor and improve the energy efficiency when operating their existing data centers, or when designing new facilities. The task force’s latest report represents the combined decision-making from the 7x24 Exchange, ASHRAE, The Green Grid, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, U.S. Department of Energy’s Save Energy Now and Federal Energy Management Programs, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Program, U.S. Green Building Council, and Uptime Institute.

The following principles were agreed to:

– PUE, using source energy consumption, is the preferred energy efficiency metric for data centers.

– When calculating PUE, IT energy consumption should, at a minimum, be measured at the output of the uninterruptible power supply (UPS). However, the industry will continue to improve measurement capabilities so that measurement of IT energy consumption directly at the IT load (e.g., servers, storage, network, etc.) becomes the common practice.

– For a dedicated data center, the total energy in the PUE equation will include all energy sources at the point of utility handoff to the data center owner or operator. For mixed-use data centers, the total energy will be all energy required to operate the data center, similar to a dedicated data center, and should include cooling, lighting, and support infrastructure for the data center operations.

"The task force has accomplished a tremendous amount of work to help the data center industry have a common understanding of energy efficiency metrics to improve data center efficiencies and reduce energy use," said Dan Azevedo, Symantec representative and Board member of The Green Grid. "We are looking forward to working with our colleagues on the next steps for the industry, including identifying a roadmap for future efficiency programs such as IT productivity and carbon accounting."

The task force intends to continue collaborating in the years ahead to ensure that data center resource efficiency and productivity is delivered as consistently as possible across regions.

The Green Grid has recently announced additional metrics to complement PUE, including Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE™) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE™), designed to help data center operators assess the sustainability of their data centers.

More news and information regarding the latest developments in Smart Grid electronics can be found at Darnell’s SmartGridElectronics.Net.